


l'odorat, senté par les narines d'un pit bull (the sense of smell, through the nostrils of a pit bull)

by Val Mora (valmora)



Category: Banlieue 13 (District B13)
Genre: M/M, UST, postmovie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damien's car smells stale, disused and dusty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	l'odorat, senté par les narines d'un pit bull (the sense of smell, through the nostrils of a pit bull)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: mild ones for the first movie.
> 
> I haven't yet seen B13-U, so this piece doesn't take that movie into account.

Damien's car smells stale, disused and dusty, when he gets back in. He didn't notice before, on the way to Banlieue 13, attention too wrapped up in Lola's easy chatting and Leïto's half-secret smile. But now that all he can see of them through the windshield is their fading outlines, he's noticed.

He closes his eyes, leans his forehead against the steering wheel. One of the guards is probably looking at him funny. Like he's never seen a guy watch his best friends walk into what amounts to a war zone before. Though it's getting better. It's getting better, Damien repeats to himself, the wall's coming down. Next month there will be schools, post offices, some of the trappings of civilization. The rest will follow.

He sits up in his seat and starts the car, edging it around the cement roadblocks to turn it around. Driving the other way, he passes through safe neighborhoods, where the drug dealers must be subtle about where they keep their wares, and where the cops are probably clean. He spends most of the drive feeling like he has a set of cross hairs splitting the back of his head into quarters.

 

Lola needed urgent medical care at a real hospital, with rehab for the heroin that Taha kept pumping her full of, so Leïto ended up sleeping in the guest room of Damien's apartment for nearly six months.

They made good roommates. Leïto was pretty quiet, didn't mind cooking or doing the dishes. Sometimes he'd go running around the city roofs for exercise, come back through the window dripping sweat and grinning wide enough to show the chipped tooth from when a gang member had punched him and broken it ten years ago. Damien learned to leave the windows open or at least unlocked, after the time Leïto knocked on the window like an especially windblown gargoyle and surprised him into dropping his lunch on the floor.

Leïto got a job, teaching gymnastics of all things. By the end of the course all the kids were gallivanting around Paris like little Leïtos, giving their mothers no end of headaches. If Leïto doesn't end up a legend at that studio, it's only because all the kids whom he taught left because there was no one else there who could do what he did.

Damien saw them running around a few times; Leïto seemed to take them past police stations every time the kids got taken around the city. Sometimes it would just be a dark blur of Leïto leaping past his window, grinning and waving a little, maybe catching himself on a drainpipe and yelling, "Hey, super-flic, how's the work?"

Pretty much the only response to that was flipping him off, but Damien was constrained by not only the fact that he was supposed to be a clean-cut model cop, but also, kids.

Sometimes he yelled back, if he was the only one in the room, "Not as interesting as Taha's compound!" He stopped after a couple of times, though. It made him tired. He missed action, was barred from actual work for a little while so that the notoriety of the voice that got Krüger convicted would fade.

Sometime around the second month, he asked Leïto to show him how to joyride through the city skyline.

 

He figures, upon getting back to his apartment from driving Leïto and Lola back, that he should do some cleaning. The apartment is kind of a mess, since they were so busy congratulating Lola on getting clean, getting herself put together again, that neither he nor Leïto really paid much attention to the apartment. Two days' worth of breakfast dishes are piled up on the counter, with a quarter-loaf of stale wheat bread becoming increasingly rocklike on the lowest shelf of an open kitchen cabinet.

At least he doesn't have to clean lunch and dinner dishes – he's been treating for the past few days. The hazard bonus from the job with Carlos Montoya came through a couple months ago, and he left it in the bank to gather interest for when Lola got better. Eating restaurant food was nice, but watching Lola's eyes light up at the sight of non-institutional food was even better.

He does the dishes, then cooks himself dinner – scrambled eggs, with crackers crumbled into it, a nutritious solid porridge made palatable mostly by the amount of pepper and salt he adds. Leïto taught him how to cook it, but he likes it – quick and relatively simple, and not taking much in the way of ingredients. He eats it straight out of the skillet, then decides he's too tired to do that bit of dishwashing, so leaves it in the sink for the burned egg bits on the edges to soak off.

He wonders if Leïto, back in Banlieue 13, has gone to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for the stir-fried green beans that Damien taught him a good spice mix for.

The guest room has one bed in it, where Leïto slept until Lola got out of rehab. After that, he slept on the couch. Damien didn't insult him by offering Leïto his bed.

Damien strips the sheets on Lola's bed, grabs a box of laundry powder, and carries them down four flights of stairs to the basement of his apartment building, where the laundry machines are. He gets them all started washing, walks the flights of stairs back up to his apartment.

He paces the four rooms of his apartment, tired but unwilling to sleep, to restless to do anything for any length of time. He sets the alarm on his watch so it'll go off when it's time to go get the sheets out of the washer and lies down on the couch, closing his eyes. Maybe he'll get in a quick ten, twenty minutes of shut-eye that'll get him focused again.

He's supposed to go undercover again in two weeks. He can see his new profile painted on the insides of his eyelids: a drug dealer's lowest minion, ready to shine boots or wash cars or whatever else the boss needs. He's missed the undercover life. He thinks he might miss being Damien, who has Leïto on his couch and Lola in his guest bedroom, almost as much.

The couch smells like Leïto, smog, car exhaust, sweat, even though he was only sleeping there for a few days. It's a good thing Damien made Leïto wash the guest bedroom sheets before Lola came. Although Lola's probably used to it, living with her brother in a run-down little apartment building in the banlieue.

Damien rolls his head around in a circle until it clicks and releases some of the tension in his neck. Usually when he's this tense, it's because he's been practicing his martial arts, but today it's just stress.

Leïto is a spectacular fighter, a pleasure to spar with, and there's nothing quite like fighting few-holds-barred on a rooftop, the sunlight piercing the eyes, the wind flaying the skin. It is exhilarating, terrifying; it changes a man and makes him want nothing more than to return to that seamless state, where all that matters is the next strike, the shifting of weight and the heaviness of the other's eyes.

Damien presses his palm flat against the cloth of his sofa and breathes in Leïto's scent, thinking already of when he will be able to return to Banlieue 13.


End file.
